Culture, High & Low 729

BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY -- As New Horizons races past Pluto this week, I offer this blast from the recent past, a tribute to the discoverer of the ninth planet (International…

The Greeks were funny. We don’t usually think of them that way; we think of them as marbled patriarchs in togas, Really Important Men We Revere for Some Reason. Admittedly,…

Holland, MI It is graduation season. On campuses across the country graduates will be subject to the last compulsory and least remarkable rite of passage: the commencement address. By my…

Rockford, Illinois.  After thirty-one years at Chronicles Magazine—thirty of them as editor—classicist, poet and polemicist Tom Fleming has retired. During his tenure at this small but influential magazine of the…

In the old days, when you saw something in your morning newspaper that bothered you, you could vent your ballooning anger with a minute or two of hearty breakfast-table grumbling.…

The most fashionable and defensible position on aesthetics is to maintain that beauty is entirely subjective. Beauty doesn't exist, we are assured, at least as a quality uniting such diverse…

Pop quiz: What ancient Greek legend begins with the kidnapping of Helen of Troy, and ends with Greeks sneaking into Troy inside a hollow wooden horse? If you said “The…

All too many people are entirely settled in their opinion that Norman Rockwell’s art presents a “falsification” of reality: in short, he is charged with utopianism. This opinion is false,…

Grand Rapids, MI Recently, in a posting entitled “A Culture of Millstones,” Katharine Dalton has lamented the too-colorful language her children are exposed to in church – words like whore, prostitute,…

The stylish crowd that walked the red carpet to the Oscars likely had not donned their Sunday best earlier in the day for a trip to church. Even so, the…

Manchester, CT I am grudgingly accepting that you don’t choose the place; the place chooses you. I’ve moved around a lot during my time on the planet, first as luggage, then…

Efficiency is a false god.

A mainland Chinese student visited my office last week, asking for a letter of recommendation for his transfer to another university. It is hard to lose a student like this—enthusiastic…

By now you’ve already forgotten last month’s most important celebrity cause, namely the embodiment of freedom of expression known as The Interview. Hollywood has too, of course. It's so 2014.…

A plea for pastors to remember their audience.

Philadelphia, PA R. J. Snell A slow thinker and slower writer—some might say the reverse—I’ve been chewing over the Christmas season for the past few days, a remembrance of things…

If you want to write worse than the average undergraduate male, consider philosophy.

[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Wichita, KS, is the home to a wonderful bookstore, Eighth Day Books. (Which isn't my favorite bookstore in Wichita, but that's partly because my wife…

A few years ago, Josh Lyman spoke at Harvard to a packed room of starstruck student politicos. It wasn’t the real Josh Lyman, of course, because he isn’t real: he…

Marian devotion remains stubbornly enduring.

Holland MI Today, Christians will celebrate the birth of Christ. Commenters on these pages have in the past noted some tensions between the Porch’s localist themes and the universalist themes…

In this edition of Tales from the Kolache Belt, we celebrate community theatre. Not many rural towns of just over 2,000 souls can boast an institution like the Gaslight Theatre,…

I recently had a chance to watch the film The Giver. Sometimes we get films early, sometimes late, sometimes at the same time as they are released in the United…

There is one version of the history of modern media that is a story primarily about a drug, developed to make its users feel anger with delightful intensity. Refinement of…